A History of English Literature

Scho fondeth in hire briddes forme, tries If that sche mihte hirself conforme, To do the plesance of a wif, As sche dede in that ...

surviving the Black Death, the French wars, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Lords Appellants’ challenge to Richard II, and Richard’s d ...

of sound, to the House of Fame (Rumour, but also Poetry), a bewildering place described in Book III. The poem breaks off as Chau ...

love, an owl who will never be a nightingale. Boethius, Dante, Langland and the poet ofPearl dream to seek enlightenment, but Ch ...

Troilus and Criseyde ‘How that Crisseyde Troylus forsok’ is told in Troilus and Criseyde, a work of marked symmetry. It opens: T ...

austere arguments. The five books ofTroilus follow the revolution of Fortune’s wheel: sexual bliss is fleeting and temporary, le ...

And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende The hooly blisful martir for to seeke blessed seek Th ...

Chaucer’s disciple Thomas Hoccleve (1367–1426) testified that Chaucer seide alweie the best. This courtesy sharpens his irony, o ...

For all its brilliant particulars, theCanterbury Tales makes us aware of general issues and typical destinies. Exceptionally a t ...

not until 1599, when poetry had claimed a public role, that Edmund Spenserwas buried near Chaucer in Westminster Abbey in what b ...

(see p. 26), and with shepherds and kings. The Easter plays began with the entry of Christ into Jerusalem, with procession and p ...

the angel of the Annunciation, his wooing of Alysoun echoes The Song of Songs, and the gullible wife-worshipping carpenter recal ...

Sweetly clear exemplification of doctrine is the aim of some lyrics, as it was of the paintings of Fra Angelico. A perfect one i ...

Alliterative Morte, from Lincolnshire. These derive from the French prose La Mort Artu and were among Malory’s sources. The Stan ...

in love that she besought Sir Launcelot to were uppon hym at the justis [jousts] a tokyn of hers. Lancelot demurs, then decides ...

and set up a press near Westminster Abbey in 1476. Most of the eighty books he printed were religious, but the first was his tra ...

Robert Henryson (?1424–?1506), William Dunbar(?1460-?1513) and Gavin Douglas(?1475–1522) each has a considerable body of work. T ...

‘The fear of death distresses me.’ As a priest, Dunbar will have pronounced this refrain as a Response in the Office of the Dead ...

autumn, he sees the cranes, birds which then spent the summer in Scotland, flying in a Y formation. This ‘Northern’ realist deta ...

Tudor and Stuart PART 2 ...